Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: Louis Vuitton

More and more digital brands want to lay down physical roots and create their own permanent stores. At the same time, retailers are ramping up online sales initiatives for increasingly digitally savvy shoppers. So now we have the trend to make showroom-style spaces resemble highly curated homes and apartments. Which makes us want to buy everything and move in.

Freunde von FreundenApartment

Luxury apartments:

The trend for homely retailing has evolved over the last year or so, kick-started by luxury players such as Louis Vuitton with its decadent Hong Kong L’Appartement by Andre Fu, and the personal shopping bachelor pad at Holt Renfrew’s new men only Toronto flagship.

L’Appartement Louis Vuitton, by Andre Fu

After opening their relaxed, sun-drenched LA flagship, complete with outdoor pool, The Olsen Twins are eyeing a similarly homely retail destination in NY’s Upper East Side, according to WWD. Ashley Olsen described the LA store as ‘about setting it up as a home and just having the apparel be a part of the space.’

Curated room-tailing:

Stylists Vanessa Traina and Morgan Wendelborn set up US e-commerce site The Line in 2013 as a place to showcase their personal style across homeware, fashion and beauty products. They launched The Apartment, an airy Soho loft space, shortly after as a physical embodiment of the site, where customers can meet with the creatives behind labels stocked, and the pair host discussions, workshops and screenings. This form of curated, one-to-one apartment-style selling adds a valuable aesthetic layer to the online shopping experience, where customers are buying into a lifestyle not just a product range. Whistles has taken a similar approach, hosting its last two seasonal press days in penthouse lofts in London.

The Line Apartment

Alex Eagle is the eclectic curator behind Soho House’s newest retail location, The Store in Berlin. There is a stylish lifestyle edit with bit of everything on offer, from designer fashion and accessories, contemporary furniture, homewares and organic food from The Store Kitchen as well as beauty services from Barbour & Parlour. It’s designed in the style of a relaxing, homely loft apartment with soft velvet sofas and ‘shabby luxe’ workstations next to the library of books and magazines provided by Idea Books. There’s a florist by Mary Lennox and music by The Vinyl Factory. Everything is set over the spacious ground floor of the Berlin hotel location. ‘I wanted the space to be an open, shoppable private home for everyone to hang out in,’ Eagle said to T Magazine.

The Store by Alex Eagle at Soho House, Berlin

Suitcase Magazine has a great interview with Eagle where she talks about sourcing localized, new talent across the creative design industries.

Showrooming meets design

The worlds of interiors, design and even real estate are utilizing apartment-style showrooming to sell furniture and homewares.

For the newly renovated, but still off-plan central London Saint Martins Lofts scheme, gallerist and designer Marc Peredis has created a warm, minimalist show apartment, exclusively utilising pieces from artists represented in his Soho gallery, 19 Greek Street.

Saint Martins Lofts by Marc Peredis

Dutch architecture & design magazine Frame created a 3D rendition of its pages at a pop-up shop in the Felix Meritis building for Amsterdam’s temporary cultural festival, Felix & Foam, in 2014. The space, designed by Dutch studio i29, was intended to be a mirrored universe, using reflective surfaces to create a sensory, immersive shopping experience. Frame curated a mix of new talent from the design world, showcased in modernist room sets, set against the grand backdrop of the building’s 18th architecture. In a similar project last year, German online magazine Freunde von Freunden (FvF) furnished a Berlin flat as part of a 3D editorial project for Swiss furnishings manufacturer Vitra.

Frame Magazine at Felix & Foam

Freunde von Freunden Apartment for Vitra

Dining at home:

The idea of curating an ‘at home’ experience is also represented by restaurants, where patrons buy into the vision of the chef as much as the food.

At my favourite new restaurant and bar, Old Tom & English in London’s Soho, interior designer Lee Broom has created a décor very much an ode to British decadence from a bygone era. The idea was to replicate a 1960s living room, where diners come to join an intimate cocktail party and stay for nibbles.

Old Tom & English, Soho

Danish restaurant Noma in Copenhagen is currently having some time-out from serving food, instead focusing on translating its worldwide reputation into a retail experience. Earlier this year it opened a shoppable pop-up store in Tokyo, selling locally made tableware and furniture in collaboration with Japanese designer and creative director Sonya Park of Arts&Science. And last month, US retailer Club Monaco moved into Noma’s original Copenhagen space for a curated offering of its mens and womens collections as well as local New York-based furniture and homeware designs and vintage collectibles from around the world.

Club Monaco at Noma, Copenhagen

What does it all mean?

Designing retail or restaurant spaces that replicate a home environment takes customers a step closer to imagining a selection of curated products in their own living space. Plus, it’s the perfect antidote to 2D online shopping, making the most of showrooming as a tactile retail experience.

Here’s a round-up of January’s more interesting phygital retail bytes:

CES kick-starts the year with a host of innovative tech ideas and nascent, phygital developments to watch with retailers in mind. This year, wearables finally got exciting, the IoT (Internet of Things) got closer to reaching breaking point in our homes, and consumers saw how technology is ready to transform the shopping experience. My favourite round-ups from Bloomberg Business Week and Brand Channel touched on many key trends.

Estimote beacons

The Retail Big Show in New York closely follows CES, and the role of technology in stores increases with importance every year. This year, the show profiled eBay’s connected store concept, currently on trial at Rebecca Minkoff and Nordstrom stores, according to this report in Retail Design World, and magic mirrors were the top attraction according to Retailing Today’s review. Disruptive retail strategy was one of the show’s key take-outs for Retail Touchpoints while mobile apps that are enabling beacon technology uptake was top of the buzz list for CNBC.

Neiman Marcus has installed interactive inventory tables that blend into its footwear departments, and will spur sales conversions according to Luxury Daily.

Omni-channel is the word of 2015 for eBay, that has just launched its new sellers platform: Retail Associate Platform, according to WWD.

Mall rats are not dead, they are part of retail’s big phygital strategy, says Kevin McKenzie, Westfield’s global chief digital officer, who talks to the Business of Fashion about Westfield’s new World Trade Centre location in New York.

Virtual retail is a step closer thanks to Microsoft’s new Holo Lens headset. Here Dezeen suggests what might be possible.

Tommy Hilfiger has launched a digital showroom that is shaking up the fashion buying world.

Pinterest is gaining traction among advertisers as brands flock to the channel’s ‘Pinfluencers’, according to the Wall Street Journal. And stylish influential men are Pinterest’s new target, as the image curation site works on its search functionality with ‘geek’ content.

AdAge has a refreshing take on how Snapchat could kill the trend for consumer showrooming in stores via one-off snap coupons or scavenger hunt style retail promotions.

Fashion and beauty brands are combining user-generated content with discovery-commerce opportunites on Instagram. Joining the Insta-commerce party is Preen.Me, a platform that has recently run exclusive deals with Tweezerman and Bumble & Bumble, according to WWD (sub req).

Watching the SS15 Moschino show live-stream from Milan last month, you could be forgiven for getting caught up in the saccharine pink, baby-doll Barbie bubble. Orchistrated by maverick designer Jeremy Scott, this show (and overly branded capsule collection), was a #MFW moment that will have a sell by date of roughly one month. Blink and you might miss it. But not if retailers Nordstrom, Selfridges and La Rinascente had anything to do with it. These retailers all started promoting and selling the Barbie line hours after the show (aided by all the Instagram photos showing Anna Della Russo and Cara Delevigne cavorting around in the pieces at the post-show party). Welcome to the era of insta-ready runway collections available to buy now.

Julien David at Colette, Paris

Moschino isn’t the only one leaning on its retail partners for instant runway sales. Colette continues to play the role of retail mentor by showcasing its favourite Paris designers in its window on the same day the labels show on the runways. With a simple poster message to order online for pre-season delivery, customers could snaffle the new SS15 pieces by Julien David and JW Anderson for Loewe almost as the shows finished.

DSM 10th anniversary Louis Vuitton window

Dover Street Market is another pre-season sale protagonist. As part of its 10th anniversary last month, the luxury store hosted the first ‘ephemeral’ boutique for Nicholas Ghesquiere’s debut collection for Louis Vuitton a full month before the collection hit elsewhere.

Ghesquiere Louis Vuitton preview at DSM AW14, London

Colette was also at the centre of the pre-order hullabaloo of the new Apple Watch, previewing for one day only on 30 September in the window and in-store, complete with guest appearance by designers Jony Ives and Marc Newson. Timed to coincide with Paris Fashion Week, this launch was a sure-fire indicator of the luxe-fash-tech appeal for Apple’s much-anticipated new wearable device.

The traditional bi-annual fashion season cycle is now a thing of the past. Designer brands are responding to the ‘want-it-now’ culture of social-media driven commerce and delivering fast-fashion as it happens. And the power of digital is democratizing exclusive collections, from luxury fashion to high-end tech – proving e-commerce and physical stores can work in harmony together